Remix Ultra tablet, a Surface look-a-like, hits Kickstarter

You may recall back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show that three former Google engineers created quite a fracas when they unveiled their Remix Ultra tablet.

If you saw the coverage, images and are familiar with the Surface line of devices from Microsoft then your Spidey-senses were probably tingling like mine were.

Although their Remix Ultra tablet will use the Remix OS, a re-worked version of Android that has been optimized for large screen devices, the physical similarities between it and the Surface go beyond generalities.

However, the reason for this story is to not talk just about the similarities to Surface but some recent news that the project is continuing to move forward now utilizing a Kickstarter campaign that began yesterday.

With a goal of $100,000 the Remix team offered the tablet to three standard reward levels:

$39 – 200 available with over 350 sold in less than a minute.

$199 – 200 available and was sold out in about 10 minutes.

$349 – 500 available with 89 sold as of this morning.

There are also $3,000 and $5,000 reward levels that not only offer the tablet, a lifetime supply of the Remix for the highest level, but also a trip to China to see Remix HQ. No takers on these two levels so far in the campaign.

Right now there is no official word on what caused the Kickstarter system to allow more rewards at the $39 level than were available nor is there any info from Jide on their plans to cancel everything above the 200th reward or honor all of them that are shown.

If you view the Kickstarter page and watch the intro video you will learn that Jide is not doing the campaign to actually build the tablet, that is already happening, but they are growing a user community and beta testers for the Remix OS. Their expectation of testers, who purchased the tablet to do so, is to use it at least 15 hours a week and provide weekly feedback.

I am not sure how they can enforce that with anyone who got the tablet through this campaign but I am sure many will get involved.

A quick check of the campaign shows they have 676 backers and are less than $1,700 away from their goal of $100,000 with 29 days remaining so it appears the effort will be successful. That means everyone will get their tablet sometime in May of this year.

I did try to grab one myself at the $39 reward level but that was a mad frenzy as soon as the page became public and I, like many others, were left without the sweet deal.

Would you try this tablet out at any of these reward levels?

But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.